Apparently Trump’s feelings were hurt after the North Koreans said mean things! The Washington Post: President Trump on Thursday canceled a planned summit next month with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, citing “tremendous anger and open hostility” from the rogue nation in a letter explaining his abrupt decision. “I feel it is inappropriate, at […]

Our panopticon is on track: Powered by artificial intelligence, Rekognition can identify, track, and analyze people in real time and recognize up to 100 people in a single image. It can quickly scan information it collects against databases featuring tens of millions of faces, according to Amazon. Amazon is marketing Rekognition for government surveillance. […]

A lot of you are understandably upset that the world expects you to take a steep cut in pay and forego benefits because they don’t see how the chicken gets made, plus you belong to a reviled profession. You’re only a step above health insurance claim processors and nuclear reactor specialists (there are family members out there who are laughing very loudly right now).

Anyway, how do you pay for everything on your vastly reduced salary while you fly back and forth between coasts trying to keep your head above water? Well, this article in the NYTimes describes one possible option. It’s called the Freelancers Union and it is growing:

For most of the 20th century, it was efficient to link benefits to jobs this way. But today, more and more work falls outside the one-to-one, employee-to-employer relationship. Work is decentralized, workers are mobile, and working arrangements are fluid…

Considering the number of employers who are appearing to renege on benefits like pensions, it makes sense to just forgo loyalty to a business and freelance if you can. Why offer them something they aren’t offering you anyway? Of course, it means we’ll hear the whining about being unable to find skilled labor because the morons in charge of the companies will never recognize that just like them – labor also looks to maximize value for their budgets and isn’t in the habit of giving away something for nothing.

If you are a non-union non-permajob freelancer, you are the natural
structured-class-victim of the employER class right there. You are one of the million breaking waves upon which the employERS love to go employee-surfing.

(I am non-union too, but I have a permajob . . . unless something changes and then I don’t. But for now, I do.)

YES! That is why it is so important to make more “non-union non-permajob freelancers”. How many times in the last 14 years have we heard praise for the “self-employed”? As if we are all just dying to start a new business and work for ourselves- not. But we sure do get fed a lot of encouragement to strike out on our own, don’t we?
Well, I really can do that from home. I own my home, don’t have a mortgage, my property taxes are a joke compared to what I paid in NJ and in taking contract work at home, I would only be supplementing my income from a regular job (that I hope to get). It’s a win-win.
But I still don’t like working for myself.

….The report reveals other aspects of the social crisis. The share of young families burdened by education debt nearly doubled, from 22.4 percent to 38.8 percent, between 2001 and 2013. The share of young families with more than $100,000 in debt has grown nearly tenfold, from 0.6 percent to 5.6 percent.

…. The data undercuts the endless talk of “partisan gridlock” in Washington and the media presentation of a political system paralyzed by irreconcilable differences between the Democratic and Republican parties..

There has, in fact, been a seamless continuity between the Bush and Obama administrations in the pursuit of reactionary policies of war abroad and class war at home…..

The ” strike out on your own! Be captain of your own ship! ” crap was used in 2004 when Bush tried and failed to dismantled SS into private Wall St accounts. The public didn’t buy that bucket load and the public , NOT the Dem party, put a stop to it

Mr. O was successful in handing us over to the Health care insurance Industrial complex, because they had learn not to ask the public , but pretend they were providing affordable care LOL…Huma’s stock is up since then 400%

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Body: Last week I went down to Washington, D.C. to deliver a paper at a conference in the technical field where I worked, ten years or so and two or three careers ago, before the dot.com trash. The trip was solely an exercise in merit-making, since I doubt very much I'll get work in the field, but reconnecting with old friends was really great -- even […]

The Hill, "Court orders Iran to pay billions to 9/11 victims and families: A federal judge on Tuesday ordered Iran to pay billions of dollars in damages to the families of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks." It's unlikely they will actually pay it, but the very idea that Iran should have to pay for an attack by Saudi Arabians is pr […]